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Friday, December 21, 2012

Thank you to all the parents who donated their time and/or donated snacks and goodie bags. Your help made our party great!! Thank you for all the lovely gifts. I feel grateful for all the parent support I have received!!!

We played some games before (or after) we ate our snacks. Here is a picture of the ring toss game.

We also played a dancing game that is a variation of musical chairs. Students dance in place to the music and when the music stops, they must sit down on the floor. The last one to be seated is out. The game continues in this manner until only one student is left dancing and he/she is the winner.

Each student made a card and it was attached to the bag containing the snowman gift.

It was a perfect day to make Heidi's holiday hat. We also wrote the numbers by tens on the ornaments.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Decomposing numbers to ten is one of our new common core
standards.We started with a tens frame
and some double sided counters.I rolled
a big foam die and that number was counted out with the red side of the
counters.The remaining spaces were
filled with the yellow side of the counters.I charted our number sentences and color coded the numbers red and
yellow to match the counters on the frames.

We followed up with a decomposing numbers Hanukkah themed
worksheet that I created.Students are starting
to catch on to this difficult concept, but we will be practicing more in the
future.

Here are a few of the finished products from our Hanukkah
thinking maps.

Here is a copy of a bubble map writing for the gingerbread from Lori Rosenberg.

These Santa projects were inspired by Deanna Jump's.

We were able to do this activity today from Primary Reading Party. We
had to discuss some of the vocabulary for a few of these Christmas items. We also had to decide which words we wanted to choose to call the objects, since different words had different syllables.

Monday, December 3, 2012

We had a fun Monday! We were finally able to graph what our first bite of a gingerbread cookie would be!! I had been looking for an appropriate cookie at the grocery store for some time. I thought we were out of luck until I discovered these gems in the bakery section.

So we each got a cookie and we graphed our first bite!

Then we followed up with an language arts activity that required students to use some of their beginning reading skills. They had to unscramble a sentence telling about the first bite they took first.

Teachers: I have shared a copy of this scrambled up sentence page with you if you wish. It is not pretty-just done with regular Microsoft word, but it might save you some time.scrambled sentences

We also used the gingerbread teens activity from Kindergarten Crayons.

I also have my own gingerbread set of numbers for 5's. You can use these for a headband or just to put them in order.

Also scroll down to the end of the previous post for a Hanukkah Thinking Map!The link is at the bottom of that post! Here is a picture of what that looks like!

If you look around more, you'll see some of the activities I have tried that were created by some of the authors of Freebieliciousand other fabulous bloggers! You'll also see some of the things I have just tried out myself. I hope you find something useful!

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

We have been having a great time with The Gingerbread Man story. This is the cover of the version I have been reading. It has a little different ending where the fox tricks the Gingerbread man by telling him he can't hear him and to come closer. Of course, you know the rest! We discussed and reviewed story elements: character, setting, problem, and solution using this book. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the students remembered theseconcepts!

We have also made a Gingerbread man glyph. Students colored eyes to match eye color, counted out buttons to showage, and used yellow or green yarn to show gender.

The dark brown men were done by the AM group and the light brown men were done by the PM group.

This was the writing activity done to follow up the glyph project.

(I have more than 24 students. A few children did not get to make a gingerbread man.)

When the students arrived in the morning, they were all a buzz and counting the gingerbread men on the wall. Some were trying to see how many students have blue eyes. Some were trying to determine the number of boys and girls. Charting the class totals was on the day's agenda, but originally not intended to be the first activity!

We still have some more activities planned for this story. Next month, we'll get some Social Studies by learning about other holiday traditions such as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.

TEACHERS: I have had at least two of you request a Hanukkah Thinking Map so I am sharing this. You need to download both parts separately. Sorry.

Hanukkah Facts page is found here.The Hanukkah Thinking Map is found here.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Here is the second version of the giant turkey. The wings are painted with colorful dots. _______________________________________________________This interactive writing activity was done from the perspective of a turkey. Students helped to generate sentences and helped with most of the writing. I had to support the children in friendly letter format, as they were not familiar with this structure.

Finally, we did some study of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. I showed a video of the first Thanksgiving from the Discovery Education site to create background knowledge. I reread the same Thanksgiving story. During the first reading, I realized this was a very abstract concept for the children. Their understanding increased after viewing the video. Each child was given one of these to take home.

I got this idea from the Dollar Tree's website. I created the Mayflower tag and added the pilgrim. The pilgrims came from the Making Learning Fun web page. I loved how these turned out!